Sunday, April 19, 2009

Para Thina Poluphloisboio Thalasses

The seas of Greece are the Odyssey whose music we can never know: the limitless sweep and throb of prosody, the flux and reflux of hexameters scanned by winds and currents and accompanied, for its escort of accents,

for the fall of its dactylsthe calm of spondeesthe run of tribrachsthe ambiguity of trocheesand the lash of anapests;for the flexibility of accidence,the congruence of syntaxand the confluence of its crasis;for the fluctuating of enclitic and proclitic,for the halt of caesurae and the flight of the digamma,for the ruffle of hard and soft breathings,for its liquid syllables and the collusion of diphthongs,for the receding tide of proparoxytones,and the hollowness of perispomena stalactitic with subscripts,for the inconsequence of anacolouthon,the economy of synecdoche,the compression of hendiadysand the extrvagance of its epithets,for the embrace of zeugma,for the abruptness of asyndetonfor the swell of hyperboleand the challenge of apostrophe,for the splash and the boom and the clamour andthe echo and the murmur of onomatopoeia

by the

islands and harbours and causeways and soundings and crescents of shingle, whirlpools and bays and lagoons and narrows and chasms and roadsteads, seismic upheavals of crags in the haze of dying volcanoes; islets lying in pale archipelagos, gulfs, reefs and headlands, warrened with cavities, that end in a litter of rocks and spikes where the limestone goes dark at sunset; thunderbolt sea-marks scattered on the water, light in the reign of the Pleiades, slowly spinning the sea-sounds that sigh in the caves of solitary islands.